“My dear Dr. Kennedy, that’s exactly what I said about my wife twenty-eight years ago.” He chuckled lightly. “If it were that simple, I don’t expect you would’ve been as elusive as Bigfoot in these hospital corridors of late.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but he held up his hand.
“No judgment, doctor. It’s about time you found some balance in your life.”
He smiled and turned in the direction of the bay Taryn had been wheeled into. Did everyone in the hospital know about her private life? Her thought was reinforced with the unwelcome appearance of Barr as Rachel gently took Cassie’s arm to lead her to the rider who’d come in with Taryn.
“High profile, this mess,” he said, his voice flint-hard. “No mistakes.”
Barr focused his gaze on Cassie, and she narrowed her eyes, and her body tensed for retaliation.
Rachel leaned close to her ear and whispered, “You don’t have the time to waste on him.”
The muscles in her legs went jello-soft with the reference to time. Taryn was always so concerned with the concept, with making the most of what she had while she had it, of not wasting any of it. Cassie’s muscles strengthened again, along with a rising anger. Tarynwaswasting her time; how could lying on a hospital gurney with potentially life-threatening injuries possibly be viewed as a quality use of the finite time she had?
She allowed Rachel to guide her around Barr and pushed away the thought that she should find somewhere else to work. Barr had shown he was here to stay, and he was more concerned with making their hospital profitable than increasing the number of lives they saved.
Cassie entered the treatment bay and slipped into autopilot once more, though she strained to hear any sounds of anguish and pain from Taryn in the adjacent bay. When her ears tuned in, Cassie immediately wished she hadn’t. The tension and concern in Fischer’s voice filtered in after she heard Barr repeat his warning. Every fiber of her being wanted to switch patients with Fischer, to hell with the rules. They could fire her after she’d saved Taryn’s life. How was she supposed to stand here and ignore the possibility that Fischer wouldn’t diagnose something fast enough, that he wouldn’t act with enough speed, that he might nick an artery as he inserted the needle to remove the air from Taryn’s collapsed lung?
She felt Rachel’s steadying presence again, the touch of her hand more firm this time.
“Cassie. You need to concentrate,” Rachel whispered.
Cassie squeezed her eyes closed briefly and tried to empty her mind of everything but the situation in front of her and the other woman who might need her expertise to save her life. She couldn’t forgive herself if her inattention led to someone else’s death. She opened her eyes wide, took in the scene in front of her, and set about doing her job… and praying to every god or deity that actually existed that Fischer would do his well enough to save the woman Cassie loved.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The inferno of heat spreading across Taryn’s chest took her breath away, making it even more difficult to breathe than it already had been since someone’s bike crashed into her chest at fifty miles per hour. She closed her eyes against the harsh lighting of the hospital ceiling and tried to use the tools she’d learned from Cassie’s BodyBalance class.
It didn’t work. Guiding yourself to a meditative state required deep inhalation and exhalation of air, and Taryn could do neither. In fact, the last thing she wanted to be aware of was her breathing, or rather, as it felt right now, her inability to breathe. Every molecule of oxygen she sucked in was like a collection of fireballs coursing down her throat. And when they hit her lungs, it was as if they exploded and coated all the cells in her body in a raging hell-blaze. She imagined this was what actually being in Hell would feel like, if she believed in an afterlife, which she didn’t, despite how convincingly it had been depicted by that famous lesbian author from LA. Death did seem like she’d make a great buddy, but Taryn was in no hurry to find out if she was right or wrong about it all. The finite number of heartbeats she did believe in—she didn’t want to believe that hers were all used up, and this was how it ended. This was howsheended.
A particularly excruciating shot of pain pulled her back into the room and onto the bed. Maybe the meditation had been working after all. Her eyes jerked open, and the fluorescent light flooded in. She could make out softly outlined shapes of doctors and nurses as they moved around her, barking out demands that sounded like a foreign language. Machines beeped and whirred all around her, and she became aware of cold metal against her skin, sliding from her stomach and upward. When she heard the accompanying snip of metal against metal, she realized what was happening.Not my jacket. She loved that jacket. Not because it had sentimental value or because it had been the jacket that she’d accomplished a spectacular stunt in for the first time, but because it smelled of Cassie. It was the jacket Taryn had wrapped around Cassie’s shoulders and insisted she put on while they watched the Bellagio’s water fountains one night after an early round of stunning sex. So it didn’t just smell of Cassie and her sweet perfume, it had been infused with the scent of her most animalistic self. After Taryn had kissed Cassie goodnight and gone to her bike in the garage, she’d pulled it on, and her nose had been assailed by its intoxicating strength. It took all her resolve not to go back inside for more; Cassie had an early shift and needed sleep. Taryn had needed Cassie.
And in the past couple of weeks when they’d been unable to spend as much time together as they wanted, Taryn had fed her hunger by pressing that jacket to her nose, closing her eyes, and imagining Cassie in her arms. It was all very dramatic. And alien. And made her feel quite pathetic. But she didn’t care.
Pain, along with someone repeating her name over and over, tugged her consciousness back into the cold, sterile room. The violent heat across her chest hadn’t lessened, and she much preferred to be back in her head, alone with her musings and away from all this emergency nonsense she didn’t want to be party to.Fix me and let me rest.
The same voice was asking questions, but Taryn couldn’t make out the words. She squinted against the light in an effort to focus on the black hole where the sounds were coming from, but that didn’t help. Their sentences simply wouldn’t form any coherent connections in her brain that she could decipher. She let her eyelids close, the effort of keeping them open proving too much, and muttered at them to get on with it. She didn’t have time to be lying around in an emergency room. She had things to do with her life, places to visit, new people to meet. She chuckled and regretted it immediately when the resulting vibration made her suck in another mouthful of fireballs and set her insides aflame.
When the pain subsided enough to remember why she’d laughed, Taryn stopped herself from doing it again.New people to meet. Hadn’t she already met the most amazing person she could ever have hoped to meet on her extensive and unending travels? Wasn’t Cassie everything good and right with the world? Taryn hadn’t been roaming the planet in search of such a woman, but when Cassie had presented herself so memorably in the club that night, “protecting” Taryn from the wicked advances of vampy Erin, it felt a little like she could stop her wanderingbecauseof such a person.
But that had been the alcohol careening around her bloodstream, dulling every urge other than the sexual ones. When her most animalistic tendencies rose to the surface, she had always been quick to forget everything else that was important to her until those tendencies had been sated. Still, Cassie was a wonderful woman, and Taryn needed to survive this so they could spend more time together before she had to leave for Andi’s ranch to get the next adventure in her life in motion.
If that was what she still even wanted. Hell, she still hadn’t worked out why she felt so lost and aimless. What if this new development wasn’t what she was supposed to be doing? Was shesupposedto be doing anything? Maybe she was kidding herself that she had some dream to discover, to follow to the pot of contentedness at the far end of the rainbow.
She felt a sharp prick against the skin of her arm, then ice-cold liquid invaded her veins and blasted through her blood like frozen volcano lava. She took another sharp intake of breath that resulted in yet more chili powder cannonballs bombing down her throat. Moments later, something cold and hard pushed against the wall of her chest, and when it punctured, she couldn’t hold back the subsequent scream of agony. Tendrils of darkness edged her eyeballs and began to close in, and she welcomed the black nothingness they promised.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cassie had completed her work with the fourth rider and had also assessed the fifth and final patient who’d come in with the third ambulance. Her wife, Gwen, had ridden with her, and she’d been at pains to make sure Cassie knew her name—Fig, which was an unusual moniker—how old she was, and how they’d recently been talking about starting a family.
Cassie knew well enough the psychology behind the information dump; Gwen thought that if she could make Fig’s doctor care about her, about them both, and about their life together, that Cassie would work harder to save her. With other doctors, the ones who had become jaded and tired, maybe that was necessary, but her tactics weren’t required here. After her initial inability to focus, Cassie had pulled reserves from some deftly hidden place to shutter off the torrent of terror, anxiety, and fear threatening to overwhelm her, and she’d fallen into well-worn patterns to concentrate on the patient in front of her.
Fig had some contusions and deep bruising from her collision. But as the final rider to join the mangled pile of metal and bodies Gwen had described in disturbing detail, Fig had gotten off rather lightly. No broken bones. No trauma. No lasting damage. Cassie pushed away the unkind and selfish wish that Taryn had been in Fig’s place rather than at the epicenter of the crash.
Gwen sat in the chair beside Fig in the temporary bay she’d been wheeled into. “Thank you, doctor,” she said.
Cassie pulled down her mask and smiled. “You’re welcome.”
